11 ms·

YC, not Lambda School, is unbundling education

120 points by asciimike 7y ago

juskrey 7y ago
The simplest IT education truth: nothing can beat autodidactism and risk taking. Schools and unis mostly benefit themselves.
shafyy 7y ago
> But as YC’s success indicates, there have been many hypothetical billion-dollar companies that didn’t come into existence because the founders never got the right introductions. Your takeaway from this should be that if you’re very ambitious, the biggest risk you can take is to be a loner. How can you possibly know that?
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  You can’t know but you can make inferences. If you are trying to do something big and risky you should be focusing on the reason you think it will work, making a big bet on your reason for being, your core competency. Everything else you follow best practice or buy in best practice. The more ways you’re weird the more ways there are to fail. Be weird in the ways you are very confident in. Going it alone does not seem to be the way most people win big so unless you have excellent reason to think you’re different don’t go it alone.
mikekchar 7y ago
This was a really strange article for me. I'd love it if someone would tell me if I understood it correctly. The author seems to be saying outright that universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there has little value. The author breaks down the value in terms of signalling (which I admit not to understand very well), human capital (i.e. a trained populace -- is there a more antagonistic way of putting it???), and fun for students. Signalling seems to be validation of intelligence??? (I am SMRT)... I don't know. He has a big section labelled "In defence of signalling" where he seems to simply say that the 4 year wait to get your degree seems to be a bit of a waste of time. The university can provide the signalling by just handing out the accreditation... He says nothing as far as I can tell about "human capital". Like an education... I just get the impression that the author assumes that there is no value in it... at all? I could imagine a followup article saying something like, "Well, why are we doing this education thing anyway -- Just train on the job! Cut out the middle man!" Except that he seems to want to pump Lamda for... no reason in particular? I'm just going to ignore the fun bit because it seems to be there simply to make people angry. I guess... Is this sarcasm? Am I intended to take this seriously (real question by the way)? More interestingly, is this a popular opinion around here given the front page placement?
- estomagordo 7y ago
  I read the article as a thought provoking way to just twist perspectives around and not as an actual proposal to dramatically revamp higher education. I found it interesting and mildly amusing.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  > The author seems to be saying outright that universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there has little value. The author mentions that the value of college measured against alumni's wages does not follow a knowledge path (as if the skills increase your income) but a signaling path (as if other people can imagine what you are worth). Thats the spiel about the last semester being the most valuable one, regardless of its content. There is no doubt that signaling is huge: as the recent scandal of admissions into top universities revealed, even though some parents bribed officials to enter college, the kids had no issues passing the classes. It would be cheaper if only going through the admissions process gave you accreditation, since that is the actual valuable part students compete for, and then let the curriculum be free for the alumni (graduating in 2 years instead? Not doing a bunch of classes you wont use, etc). I agree with the author that the value of education is way overblown, but certainly not 0.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mft_ 7y ago
  As with one of the other respondents to your comment, I read it mostly as a fun and occasionally provocative flow of thoughts, rather than any specific call to action. It makes a decent attempt to demarcate the different types of value that the current university experience offers to students. And of course, to do this comprehensively, one must acknowledge that one of the things that university acceptance and attendance offers is some sort of 'signal' of value, or intelligence, or virtue, or something, to a range of people: from parents and friends to wider society, including future employers. Anyway, to TL;DR what I believe the message of the article is, you could try: * A Lambda-school-like model might offer the educational value that major universities offer, but more cost-effectively * A YC-like model might offer the signalling, relationships and networking value that major universities offer, but more quickly and efficiently * We need to acknowledge that the non-educational aspects (as offered by the YC model) are important
keiferski 7y ago
Welcome to the new and shiny version of anti-intellectualism: where the only purpose of education is to get a job and the value of a job is determined by how lucrative it is. Now scale that up to the level of an economy and you have a basic idea of how we live in a materially-rich and intellectually-poor culture. In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. At this point, the best path forward is probably to entirely decouple "skills-based" (i.e. lucrative) training programs from "education-based" programs. Otherwise, anything that isn't economically-valuable will eventually lose funding - which has already happened for fields like philosophy or literature.
- irb 7y ago
  I think the reason that solely skills-based institutions never flourished is due to the kind of cronyism and old boy networks that the article strangely seems to see as one aspect of the current system that is worth preserving. The difficulty is in persuading those people who are hiring, who went to university, to value qualifications from skills-based courses, rather than assuming that the people who obtain them are lower class and too thick to go to university.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  The problem with the decoupling you propose is that the elites will still want real education for their children, so those programs will also be filled with careerist strivers craving the stamp of upper-class signalling. Meanwhile, your "skills-based" programs will be devalued as a worthless trade school for wannabes (for an example of this, see employers who consider things like A+ cert a negative hiring signal).
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  > In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. 1. Personally, I consider that step to be a good one. I'll put that off as poor phrasing, because otherwise I'd have to assume you'd prefer it to have stayed an elite game. 2. I don't see how that was inevitable. The opening-up of education to a broader audience inevitably led to an "intellectually-poor culture"? I don't buy that, there's a bigger story to tell here.
bugsense 7y ago
People here have a very narrow view of education. How HN is helping Classic studies. Please enlighten me
pinkfoot 7y ago
Wait until you see the skew in the teaching and nursing industries. Oh, the horror.
- estomagordo 7y ago
  97.5% of teachers are women?
  - ForHackernews 7y ago
    I'm not in the USA, but is it common there for teachers to receive millions of dollars from venture capitalists?
    - estomagordo 7y ago
      That's not a questsion that should get directed at me.
  - petra 7y ago
    In the US , only about 6% of nurses are male. https://realmanswork.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/male-nurses-worldwide/ https://realmanswork.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/male-nurses-wo...
    - pinkfoot 7y ago
      Its also telling that the male-dominance of long distance trucking (in air-conditioned trucks with power-steering) is in the same range, but not so much as a peep about that.
      - estomagordo 7y ago
        If the long distance trucking forums aren't peeping about this, maybe ask _them_ why?
      - sct202 7y ago
        I think it depends on what circles you run in. I used to work in operations and there are definitely programs to get women in trucking, because for the employers it's a no brainer to get the potential labor pool to expand.
paganel 7y ago
I'm going to be that guy, but am I wrong on the fact that there's only one woman in the photo depicting what it looks to me like a YC "meeting"? That is compared to about ~40 guys that make the rest of the audience. That's a depressingly low percentage. Are there any public numbers on the men-to-women ratio when it comes to YC alumni?
- keiferski 7y ago
  They have a blog post for each session that covers this: https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2019-batch-stats/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2019-batch-stats/
  - paganel 7y ago
    Thanks. 16% is still a surprisingly low number for 2019, I had expected something like 40-60 or at least 35-65. Also, surprising how they added black and Latino people to the stats but they “ignored” the Asian minority. Are they now part of the “privileged” minorities so that they can be ignored? If not, what’s the reason behind omissions like these?
    - jimbokun 7y ago
      The label is "UNDERREPRESENTED" so I assume any minorities represented as founders at or above their level in the general population are excluded?
- buboard 7y ago
  Isnt that due to the success of women-only incubators who presumably absorbed the best candidates leaving YC with leftovers (men)? https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-and-incubators-for-women https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-and-i...
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    That’s a really poor taste joke. You shouldn’t be making fun of those women like that.
ignoramous 7y ago
YC might yet disrupt the Berkshire Hathaway model. Like other commentators point out, it has a long way to go before it replaces higher education. May be the closest it comes is replacing the MBA programmes.
buboard 7y ago
So let's strip education of its value in learning things (replaced by Lambda or MOOCs) and its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that). YC is not so much unbundling the Ivy league cartel as much as it is competing with it. Even though YC has a better track record in expanding its student base (in response to demand) compared to universities, it's still an elite institution creating a zero-sum game of vetting the "future leaders". The monetary incentive is not really "negative", as it still costs for people to move to SF for YC - and it raises the prices for everyone there. I'd say both universities and YC have to be unbundled/disrupted. Presumably by some publicly traded entities whose profit depends on the productivity of the people they educate or vet (a publicly traded lambda or YC with research divisions etc). Then the public can invest on entities that benefit the overall productivity of their society instead of the ego of some academics. Or probably a combination of both Lambda & YC: Education should be free, or even be paid. After all , it IS work. Incubators should be competing to attract the best candidates to educate.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that). There’s no need to replace that. Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], and people who enjoyed discussing it continued through the end of their worlds multiple times, whether the Greeks, Romans (Augustine), Persians or anyone else who saw the world they believed in died. YC isn’t in a zero sum game. They’ll certify anyone they think is awesome as awesome. Harvard will only certify a maximum number in the matriculating class, and they certainly won’t deliberately create competitors in that space like YC did with Pioneer. YC does its very best to disrupt itself. It does pay those it’s educating and there are technically competitors to it as an accelerator. [1] https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t... https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthicists-150715.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthic...
  - grawprog 7y ago
    >Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], Anecdotally, I can agree with this. Ethics class seemed to be more about learning how ethics are vague and how they can be used to 'ethically' justify even atrocious things. I really disliked my ethics class. Most of my classmates didn't like it either. We actually ended up getting into a big argument with the teacher once over something that ended with her just screaming at us all to shut up, told us we were all wrong then just made us read for the rest of class and wouldnt teach any more that class.
hackathonguy 7y ago
> Already, there are a few companies that have applied to YC, gotten accepted, and ostentatiously turned it down. Can anyone shed some light into this? Why do companies turn down YC after being accepted?
- arcanus 7y ago
  A few reasons I've encountered: They require founders to relocate They take a non-trivial equity stake as the price of admission It's a huge time commitment Not stating that YC isn't an incredible program and a great value proposition. Just that it has some challenges.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    That doesn’t make sense. All these are public. Why apply at all if that’s the case?
mnky9800n 7y ago
I am always concerned by the idea that universities simply exist to hand out education. Most of the science, software, technology, etc. that is being used by all these companies with people obsessed with disrupting education has been developed, in part, by research laboratories at universities. It sort of feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I always wonder how much the "disrupter" knows about the university when they ignore all the things universities do besides hand out undergraduate degrees.
- forbiddenvoid 7y ago
  This sort of assumes that research can only happen at - or in partnership with - a university doesn't it? Those two activities (research and learning/certification) do not have to be tied together.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Indeed, just because the research university has been a successful model doesn’t mean others aren’t possible, like RAND, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, SRI International or the Max Planck Society.
    - analognoise 7y ago
      All of whom were staffed by people heavily credentialed by universities, and who published in the same journals their University colleagues did? That strikes me as exactly the same model, but without the teaching aspect?
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        The research university, but without teaching, is about as different from the research university as a horseless carriage is from a horse and carriage.
        Vervious 7y ago
baron816 7y ago
Startup idea: unbundle the party aspect of college. That kind of social life is not something you could purchase elsewhere right now. Figuring out how to replicate it would be worth a lot of money to a lot of people.
- ErikAugust 7y ago
  Peter Thiel called college a "consumption choice", and I think he is at least partially right about that.
- philwelch 7y ago
  The problem is that the "party aspect" only works because it's bundled. "I'm going to spend the next four years of my life partying" is not the kind of decision that parents and society are likely to subsidize.
  - baron816 7y ago
    True. That format can’t be extracted in its entirety. But what kind of format could? I don’t think it would need to apply to only 18-22 year olds.
    - philwelch 7y ago
      A lot of it is more valuable to young adults, who are still developing future social, professional, and romantic connections. Once you already have those connections, it's a fundamentally different problem--especially if one of the romantic connections works out and you end up married, maybe even having kids. And frankly any environment where you put together large numbers of young adults will probably result in "partying" if they have enough time and space to do so. There's a reason that drunken sailors staggering back from shore leave are a centuries-old cliche.
  - mrajcok 7y ago
    Agreed. But perhaps it could be bundled with something else, like working remotely as a junior engineer at a startup for min wage < x < SF CS grad comp.
jonbarker 7y ago
I enjoyed this article but I find the people rejected by Harvard more interesting than the ones who dropped out. Warren Buffett is on this list. The people who dropped out after all always had an implicit invitation to come back if things didn't work out.
lacker 7y ago
In my experience (going through YC twice), YC is more like a replacement for an MBA. YC doesn't teach you the fundamental skills of programming that you need to become a software engineer. A lot of people don't want to take a risky shot at being a successful entrepreneur. They would much rather have a stable job paying them a six-figure salary. That's one career track that a traditional CS degree provides. If that's your goal, YC isn't really the right way to go. You are much better off going through Lambda School. However, let's say you have some experience as a software engineer, but you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things. You're willing to take a little financial risk for a more interesting career path. One option is to go back to school and get an MBA. But YC is really a good alternative here. You will learn a lot about business, even if you are the "technical cofounder" and spend most of your time writing code.
- low_common 7y ago
  Don't you only have like a 1% chance of getting into YC? Not knocking what you're saying, just pointing out that getting into a solid MBA program != getting through YC. I feel like getting through YC means you're already good enough at the business side of things to at least come up with a viable business model.
- kwang88 7y ago
  Agreed – and fwiw if this line resonates: "you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things" I'd also recommend that engineers look into career switching to product management.
pongogogo 7y ago
I think this article is a bit of a stretch. The smartest thing about lambda is they thought really carefully about their pricing model, what's the optimum price and method of paying for an education, if we're optimising for keeping student and educational institutions' incentives maximally aligned? I'm not an expert but I think YC answers the same question but in a different context, with different actors.
anovikov 7y ago
This totally misses out a very important point. Colleges are hedge funds with a school attached, and attached with the only goal of making the profits they make on their endowment tax-free. Not just it's about signaling. It's also a tax avoidance scheme. This world is so broken, not surprising the richest and smartest people i know never finished college (or finished a crappy one parents just forcibly sent them to) and never officially worked anywhere. And worst part of it. Startups are also the same thing. Why startups in the "classic" (YC-sense) exist (or provide any advantage over what is derogatorily labeled "revenue business"), is the historically ultra low interest rates, which makes valuations vs EBITDA, which is an inverse of effective interest rate, absurdly high. Exiting at such a valuation is whole lot more attractive than just collecting profits by running a 'normal' business. And these ultra low interest rates are funded by robbing next generation of pensioners by printing money by the trillion: by robbing ourselves, just in the old age. It is also zero sum. Also a Ponzi scheme. Also a scam. And there is no escape from that. All the world of ours would cease to exist if we one day stopped lying to ourselves. "Real" stuff ended with abolition of the gold standard, and no one wants to go back, because it was too bad, and that or Communism would be only alternatives. We better keep pretending things are alright.
- musicale 7y ago
  If you're going to slice up universities by financial components, the university itself is a fairly large component (perhaps billions of dollars per year for some schools.) The income for the university proper (from research, tuition and fees, etc.) is often larger than endowment income. There's often also a fairly large real estate/land management component as well as a (basically professional) sports organization. Universities differ from regular hedge funds in that they don't have the same sort of investors. In fact, because they're non-profit, they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment.
  - anovikov 7y ago
    >they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment. This is same as saying that they exist for the illegal profit of their managers (laundering away the profits) rather than legal profit of their investors?
pgcj_poster 7y ago
From what I can tell, YCombinator has 3 main purposes: 1. Teaching people that money is the only thing in the universe that matters 2. Starting companies, or whatever 3. Funding Hacker News Well, in our modern age, we don't need YCombinator to do those things. You can learn (1) just by reading Hacker News comments, and people do (2) without YCombinator all the time. Therefore, we can replace YCombinator just by finding someone else to run Hacker News. But as it turns out, there's an innovative organization lobste.rs, that's willing to do just that. You can read more about why we don't need YCombinator in this book[1], written by one of the world's leading economists. [1] amazon.com/dp/0140445684/
- ryan93 7y ago
  Some weird people out there
- pushcx 7y ago
  Huh? Lobsters doesn't replace HN. Not just in the obvious, practical sense that HN is 100x bigger on any metric than Lobsters, but also in a theoretical sense, because our definition of topicality is a strict subset of HN's. And we're not trying to replace HN. And we're not an organization, or even particularly organized. If you think HN should be replaced... maybe try doing that, rather than contributing to it? (Context: I'm the admin of Lobsters.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Noos 7y ago
I don't know if this would work because it just shifts the education down to pre-18. This drastically benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive tutoring and natalist services that others can't match. It's hard enough as it is dealing with people who have been groomed from youth to be the elite in a culture that enables people to enter a four year college regardless of background; i think it would be ridiculous otherwise.
musicale 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158
rkord 7y ago
Startup Idea: A microlearning platform that unbundles skill based courses and empowers the right kind of signaling (e.g. LinkedIn certificates etc). thoughts?

120 points by asciimike 7y ago

The simplest IT education truth: nothing can beat autodidactism and risk taking. Schools and unis mostly benefit themselves.

shafyy 7y ago

> But as YC’s success indicates, there have been many hypothetical billion-dollar companies that didn’t come into existence because the founders never got the right introductions. Your takeaway from this should be that if you’re very ambitious, the biggest risk you can take is to be a loner. How can you possibly know that?

barry-cotter 7y ago
You can’t know but you can make inferences. If you are trying to do something big and risky you should be focusing on the reason you think it will work, making a big bet on your reason for being, your core competency. Everything else you follow best practice or buy in best practice. The more ways you’re weird the more ways there are to fail. Be weird in the ways you are very confident in. Going it alone does not seem to be the way most people win big so unless you have excellent reason to think you’re different don’t go it alone.

mikekchar 7y ago

This was a really strange article for me. I'd love it if someone would tell me if I understood it correctly. The author seems to be saying outright that universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there has little value. The author breaks down the value in terms of signalling (which I admit not to understand very well), human capital (i.e. a trained populace -- is there a more antagonistic way of putting it???), and fun for students. Signalling seems to be validation of intelligence??? (I am SMRT)... I don't know. He has a big section labelled "In defence of signalling" where he seems to simply say that the 4 year wait to get your degree seems to be a bit of a waste of time. The university can provide the signalling by just handing out the accreditation... He says nothing as far as I can tell about "human capital". Like an education... I just get the impression that the author assumes that there is no value in it... at all? I could imagine a followup article saying something like, "Well, why are we doing this education thing anyway -- Just train on the job! Cut out the middle man!" Except that he seems to want to pump Lamda for... no reason in particular? I'm just going to ignore the fun bit because it seems to be there simply to make people angry. I guess... Is this sarcasm? Am I intended to take this seriously (real question by the way)? More interestingly, is this a popular opinion around here given the front page placement?

estomagordo 7y ago
I read the article as a thought provoking way to just twist perspectives around and not as an actual proposal to dramatically revamp higher education. I found it interesting and mildly amusing.
conanbatt 7y ago
> The author seems to be saying outright that universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there has little value. The author mentions that the value of college measured against alumni's wages does not follow a knowledge path (as if the skills increase your income) but a signaling path (as if other people can imagine what you are worth). Thats the spiel about the last semester being the most valuable one, regardless of its content. There is no doubt that signaling is huge: as the recent scandal of admissions into top universities revealed, even though some parents bribed officials to enter college, the kids had no issues passing the classes. It would be cheaper if only going through the admissions process gave you accreditation, since that is the actual valuable part students compete for, and then let the curriculum be free for the alumni (graduating in 2 years instead? Not doing a bunch of classes you wont use, etc). I agree with the author that the value of education is way overblown, but certainly not 0.
deleted 7y ago
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mft_ 7y ago
As with one of the other respondents to your comment, I read it mostly as a fun and occasionally provocative flow of thoughts, rather than any specific call to action. It makes a decent attempt to demarcate the different types of value that the current university experience offers to students. And of course, to do this comprehensively, one must acknowledge that one of the things that university acceptance and attendance offers is some sort of 'signal' of value, or intelligence, or virtue, or something, to a range of people: from parents and friends to wider society, including future employers. Anyway, to TL;DR what I believe the message of the article is, you could try: * A Lambda-school-like model might offer the educational value that major universities offer, but more cost-effectively * A YC-like model might offer the signalling, relationships and networking value that major universities offer, but more quickly and efficiently * We need to acknowledge that the non-educational aspects (as offered by the YC model) are important

keiferski 7y ago

Welcome to the new and shiny version of anti-intellectualism: where the only purpose of education is to get a job and the value of a job is determined by how lucrative it is. Now scale that up to the level of an economy and you have a basic idea of how we live in a materially-rich and intellectually-poor culture. In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. At this point, the best path forward is probably to entirely decouple "skills-based" (i.e. lucrative) training programs from "education-based" programs. Otherwise, anything that isn't economically-valuable will eventually lose funding - which has already happened for fields like philosophy or literature.

irb 7y ago
I think the reason that solely skills-based institutions never flourished is due to the kind of cronyism and old boy networks that the article strangely seems to see as one aspect of the current system that is worth preserving. The difficulty is in persuading those people who are hiring, who went to university, to value qualifications from skills-based courses, rather than assuming that the people who obtain them are lower class and too thick to go to university.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ForHackernews 7y ago
The problem with the decoupling you propose is that the elites will still want real education for their children, so those programs will also be filled with careerist strivers craving the stamp of upper-class signalling. Meanwhile, your "skills-based" programs will be devalued as a worthless trade school for wannabes (for an example of this, see employers who consider things like A+ cert a negative hiring signal).
black_puppydog 7y ago
> In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. 1. Personally, I consider that step to be a good one. I'll put that off as poor phrasing, because otherwise I'd have to assume you'd prefer it to have stayed an elite game. 2. I don't see how that was inevitable. The opening-up of education to a broader audience inevitably led to an "intellectually-poor culture"? I don't buy that, there's a bigger story to tell here.

bugsense 7y ago

People here have a very narrow view of education. How HN is helping Classic studies. Please enlighten me

pinkfoot 7y ago

Wait until you see the skew in the teaching and nursing industries. Oh, the horror.

estomagordo 7y ago
97.5% of teachers are women?
- ForHackernews 7y ago
  I'm not in the USA, but is it common there for teachers to receive millions of dollars from venture capitalists?
  - estomagordo 7y ago
    That's not a questsion that should get directed at me.
- petra 7y ago
  In the US , only about 6% of nurses are male. https://realmanswork.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/male-nurses-worldwide/ https://realmanswork.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/male-nurses-wo...
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    Its also telling that the male-dominance of long distance trucking (in air-conditioned trucks with power-steering) is in the same range, but not so much as a peep about that.
    - estomagordo 7y ago
      If the long distance trucking forums aren't peeping about this, maybe ask _them_ why?
    - sct202 7y ago
      I think it depends on what circles you run in. I used to work in operations and there are definitely programs to get women in trucking, because for the employers it's a no brainer to get the potential labor pool to expand.

paganel 7y ago

I'm going to be that guy, but am I wrong on the fact that there's only one woman in the photo depicting what it looks to me like a YC "meeting"? That is compared to about ~40 guys that make the rest of the audience. That's a depressingly low percentage. Are there any public numbers on the men-to-women ratio when it comes to YC alumni?

keiferski 7y ago
They have a blog post for each session that covers this: https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2019-batch-stats/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2019-batch-stats/
- paganel 7y ago
  Thanks. 16% is still a surprisingly low number for 2019, I had expected something like 40-60 or at least 35-65. Also, surprising how they added black and Latino people to the stats but they “ignored” the Asian minority. Are they now part of the “privileged” minorities so that they can be ignored? If not, what’s the reason behind omissions like these?
  - jimbokun 7y ago
    The label is "UNDERREPRESENTED" so I assume any minorities represented as founders at or above their level in the general population are excluded?
buboard 7y ago
Isnt that due to the success of women-only incubators who presumably absorbed the best candidates leaving YC with leftovers (men)? https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-and-incubators-for-women https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-and-i...
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  That’s a really poor taste joke. You shouldn’t be making fun of those women like that.

ignoramous 7y ago

YC might yet disrupt the Berkshire Hathaway model. Like other commentators point out, it has a long way to go before it replaces higher education. May be the closest it comes is replacing the MBA programmes.

buboard 7y ago

So let's strip education of its value in learning things (replaced by Lambda or MOOCs) and its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that). YC is not so much unbundling the Ivy league cartel as much as it is competing with it. Even though YC has a better track record in expanding its student base (in response to demand) compared to universities, it's still an elite institution creating a zero-sum game of vetting the "future leaders". The monetary incentive is not really "negative", as it still costs for people to move to SF for YC - and it raises the prices for everyone there. I'd say both universities and YC have to be unbundled/disrupted. Presumably by some publicly traded entities whose profit depends on the productivity of the people they educate or vet (a publicly traded lambda or YC with research divisions etc). Then the public can invest on entities that benefit the overall productivity of their society instead of the ego of some academics. Or probably a combination of both Lambda & YC: Education should be free, or even be paid. After all , it IS work. Incubators should be competing to attract the best candidates to educate.

barry-cotter 7y ago
> its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that). There’s no need to replace that. Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], and people who enjoyed discussing it continued through the end of their worlds multiple times, whether the Greeks, Romans (Augustine), Persians or anyone else who saw the world they believed in died. YC isn’t in a zero sum game. They’ll certify anyone they think is awesome as awesome. Harvard will only certify a maximum number in the matriculating class, and they certainly won’t deliberately create competitors in that space like YC did with Pioneer. YC does its very best to disrupt itself. It does pay those it’s educating and there are technically competitors to it as an accelerator. [1] https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-mothers https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t... https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthicists-150715.pdf https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthic...
- grawprog 7y ago
  >Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], Anecdotally, I can agree with this. Ethics class seemed to be more about learning how ethics are vague and how they can be used to 'ethically' justify even atrocious things. I really disliked my ethics class. Most of my classmates didn't like it either. We actually ended up getting into a big argument with the teacher once over something that ended with her just screaming at us all to shut up, told us we were all wrong then just made us read for the rest of class and wouldnt teach any more that class.

hackathonguy 7y ago

> Already, there are a few companies that have applied to YC, gotten accepted, and ostentatiously turned it down. Can anyone shed some light into this? Why do companies turn down YC after being accepted?

arcanus 7y ago
A few reasons I've encountered: They require founders to relocate They take a non-trivial equity stake as the price of admission It's a huge time commitment Not stating that YC isn't an incredible program and a great value proposition. Just that it has some challenges.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  That doesn’t make sense. All these are public. Why apply at all if that’s the case?

mnky9800n 7y ago

I am always concerned by the idea that universities simply exist to hand out education. Most of the science, software, technology, etc. that is being used by all these companies with people obsessed with disrupting education has been developed, in part, by research laboratories at universities. It sort of feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I always wonder how much the "disrupter" knows about the university when they ignore all the things universities do besides hand out undergraduate degrees.

forbiddenvoid 7y ago
This sort of assumes that research can only happen at - or in partnership with - a university doesn't it? Those two activities (research and learning/certification) do not have to be tied together.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  Indeed, just because the research university has been a successful model doesn’t mean others aren’t possible, like RAND, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, SRI International or the Max Planck Society.
  - analognoise 7y ago
    All of whom were staffed by people heavily credentialed by universities, and who published in the same journals their University colleagues did? That strikes me as exactly the same model, but without the teaching aspect?
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      The research university, but without teaching, is about as different from the research university as a horseless carriage is from a horse and carriage.
      - Vervious 7y ago

baron816 7y ago

Startup idea: unbundle the party aspect of college. That kind of social life is not something you could purchase elsewhere right now. Figuring out how to replicate it would be worth a lot of money to a lot of people.

ErikAugust 7y ago
Peter Thiel called college a "consumption choice", and I think he is at least partially right about that.
philwelch 7y ago
The problem is that the "party aspect" only works because it's bundled. "I'm going to spend the next four years of my life partying" is not the kind of decision that parents and society are likely to subsidize.
- baron816 7y ago
  True. That format can’t be extracted in its entirety. But what kind of format could? I don’t think it would need to apply to only 18-22 year olds.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    A lot of it is more valuable to young adults, who are still developing future social, professional, and romantic connections. Once you already have those connections, it's a fundamentally different problem--especially if one of the romantic connections works out and you end up married, maybe even having kids. And frankly any environment where you put together large numbers of young adults will probably result in "partying" if they have enough time and space to do so. There's a reason that drunken sailors staggering back from shore leave are a centuries-old cliche.
- mrajcok 7y ago
  Agreed. But perhaps it could be bundled with something else, like working remotely as a junior engineer at a startup for min wage < x < SF CS grad comp.

jonbarker 7y ago

I enjoyed this article but I find the people rejected by Harvard more interesting than the ones who dropped out. Warren Buffett is on this list. The people who dropped out after all always had an implicit invitation to come back if things didn't work out.

lacker 7y ago

In my experience (going through YC twice), YC is more like a replacement for an MBA. YC doesn't teach you the fundamental skills of programming that you need to become a software engineer. A lot of people don't want to take a risky shot at being a successful entrepreneur. They would much rather have a stable job paying them a six-figure salary. That's one career track that a traditional CS degree provides. If that's your goal, YC isn't really the right way to go. You are much better off going through Lambda School. However, let's say you have some experience as a software engineer, but you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things. You're willing to take a little financial risk for a more interesting career path. One option is to go back to school and get an MBA. But YC is really a good alternative here. You will learn a lot about business, even if you are the "technical cofounder" and spend most of your time writing code.

low_common 7y ago
Don't you only have like a 1% chance of getting into YC? Not knocking what you're saying, just pointing out that getting into a solid MBA program != getting through YC. I feel like getting through YC means you're already good enough at the business side of things to at least come up with a viable business model.
kwang88 7y ago
Agreed – and fwiw if this line resonates: "you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things" I'd also recommend that engineers look into career switching to product management.

pongogogo 7y ago

I think this article is a bit of a stretch. The smartest thing about lambda is they thought really carefully about their pricing model, what's the optimum price and method of paying for an education, if we're optimising for keeping student and educational institutions' incentives maximally aligned? I'm not an expert but I think YC answers the same question but in a different context, with different actors.

anovikov 7y ago

This totally misses out a very important point. Colleges are hedge funds with a school attached, and attached with the only goal of making the profits they make on their endowment tax-free. Not just it's about signaling. It's also a tax avoidance scheme. This world is so broken, not surprising the richest and smartest people i know never finished college (or finished a crappy one parents just forcibly sent them to) and never officially worked anywhere. And worst part of it. Startups are also the same thing. Why startups in the "classic" (YC-sense) exist (or provide any advantage over what is derogatorily labeled "revenue business"), is the historically ultra low interest rates, which makes valuations vs EBITDA, which is an inverse of effective interest rate, absurdly high. Exiting at such a valuation is whole lot more attractive than just collecting profits by running a 'normal' business. And these ultra low interest rates are funded by robbing next generation of pensioners by printing money by the trillion: by robbing ourselves, just in the old age. It is also zero sum. Also a Ponzi scheme. Also a scam. And there is no escape from that. All the world of ours would cease to exist if we one day stopped lying to ourselves. "Real" stuff ended with abolition of the gold standard, and no one wants to go back, because it was too bad, and that or Communism would be only alternatives. We better keep pretending things are alright.

musicale 7y ago
If you're going to slice up universities by financial components, the university itself is a fairly large component (perhaps billions of dollars per year for some schools.) The income for the university proper (from research, tuition and fees, etc.) is often larger than endowment income. There's often also a fairly large real estate/land management component as well as a (basically professional) sports organization. Universities differ from regular hedge funds in that they don't have the same sort of investors. In fact, because they're non-profit, they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment.
- anovikov 7y ago
  >they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment. This is same as saying that they exist for the illegal profit of their managers (laundering away the profits) rather than legal profit of their investors?

pgcj_poster 7y ago

From what I can tell, YCombinator has 3 main purposes: 1. Teaching people that money is the only thing in the universe that matters 2. Starting companies, or whatever 3. Funding Hacker News Well, in our modern age, we don't need YCombinator to do those things. You can learn (1) just by reading Hacker News comments, and people do (2) without YCombinator all the time. Therefore, we can replace YCombinator just by finding someone else to run Hacker News. But as it turns out, there's an innovative organization lobste.rs, that's willing to do just that. You can read more about why we don't need YCombinator in this book[1], written by one of the world's leading economists. [1] amazon.com/dp/0140445684/

ryan93 7y ago
Some weird people out there
pushcx 7y ago
Huh? Lobsters doesn't replace HN. Not just in the obvious, practical sense that HN is 100x bigger on any metric than Lobsters, but also in a theoretical sense, because our definition of topicality is a strict subset of HN's. And we're not trying to replace HN. And we're not an organization, or even particularly organized. If you think HN should be replaced... maybe try doing that, rather than contributing to it? (Context: I'm the admin of Lobsters.)

deleted 7y ago

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Noos 7y ago

I don't know if this would work because it just shifts the education down to pre-18. This drastically benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive tutoring and natalist services that others can't match. It's hard enough as it is dealing with people who have been groomed from youth to be the elite in a culture that enables people to enter a four year college regardless of background; i think it would be ridiculous otherwise.

musicale 7y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158

rkord 7y ago

Startup Idea: A microlearning platform that unbundles skill based courses and empowers the right kind of signaling (e.g. LinkedIn certificates etc). thoughts?